Altman Has Trouble Selling `Secret Honor`

September 17, 1985|By Jay Boyar, The Orlando Sentinel

Robert Altman is not the sort of person to back off from making a movie because, on the face of it, the project doesn`t strike him as especially commercial. In the case of Secret Honor, the problems of ``selling`` the film are especially obvious to him.

``It`s got a very low want-to-see quotient,`` said the director during a recent phone conversation from Paris. For one thing, Secret Honor is a fictional drama about Richard Nixon, a subject that Altman believes many people are pretty sick of. And for another thing, it`s based on a one-man play -- not an especially cinematic subject.

``There`s an awful lot of things about Secret Honor, when you talk about it, that are going to keep people from going into the theater to see it,`` he said. ``Now, once they`ve seen it, we get enthusiastic audiences, wildly enthusiastic. People really like it. But it`s really hard to get people to see it.``

Perhaps because of that low want-to-see quotient, he wasn`t able to find anyone to invest in the project. Secret Honor`s modest (by Hollywood standards) budget of $350,000 came out of Altman`s pocket.

The gamble appears to be paying off. Last year, Secret Honor made a number of movie critics` ``10 best`` lists and, this year, won an international critics` prize at the Berlin film festival. Despite a sporadic release pattern since it opened in Los Angeles about a year ago, the film already has earned about half of Altman`s investment back, according to the director`s assistant. Altman called Secret Honor the ``biggest accomplishment`` of his career -- especially in that it had ``the most odds against it.``

During that career, the 60-year-old filmmaker has directed some 20 features, including M-A-S-H, Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, California Split and The Long Goodbye.

What fascinated Altman about Secret Honor -- what drove him to face the odds involved in bringing it to the screen -- was its insights about the American political system. The film, he said, uses the larger-than-life figure of Richard Nixon to look at ``the quality of the presidency.``

``I think what it really says is that no man in this system . . . ever, ever goes in clean,`` said Altman. ``You cannot become president if you are an honest man. . . . You have to sell out too much down the line. And that`s the problem.``